Help Dojo – Startup Weekend San Jose

Help Dojo is a community formed by software developers and graphic designers looking to facilitate the exchange of design and programming services developed during a Startup Weekend. There is no money exchange in Help Dojo — this community is based on reliability and a currency we have created named karma points.

Description

Help Dojo is a community formed by software developers and graphic designers looking to facilitate the exchange of design and programming services. This project was developed during Startup Weekend San Jose (SWSJ) in April 15-17, 2011. The SWSJ is a 54 hour event where interdisciplinary teams build a web or mobile application to form the basis of a business over the course of a weekend.

Process work

This project was one of the pitched ideas and was worked on during the event. I was in charge of creating the visual concept and user experience for the website. We used Customer Development approach, part of the Lean Startup® framework. We had a hypothesis “Software Developers and Graphic Designers need help from each other in small tasks they cannot do by themselves”.

In order to validate our hypothesis, identify our audience, understand their needs, goals, and context, the team launched a landing page with a survey to define features of our Minimal Viable Product (MVP). With the information gathered we developed a business model.

Help Dojo Landing Page, Business Model, and Sign up page variations.

Outcomes

The MVP included a Sign Up page, User Profile and the functionality needed to ask and give help. There is no money exchange in Help Dojo – this community is based on reliability and a currency we have created named karma points. Each task has a number of karma points as a reward that can be used to ask for a favor in the future.

This project is still in development. You can ask to early access to the community’s beta version in helpdojo.com.